Other Voices: Government Shouldn't Do It All

June 25, 2006|By PATRICK M. MCSWEENEY

There will never be enough spending for some legislators. Although the long-delayed state budget that the General Assembly enacted in recent days will increase appropriations dramatically over the current level of spending, Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, complained: "There are still many needs in the commonwealth that must be addressed." This statement warrants parsing.

Does the word "needs" mean that every demand for government funding deserves funding? If not, how should legislators decide what should be funded? When Whipple says that unfunded needs "must" be addressed, does she mean that legislators have an obligation to raise taxes until all needs are satisfied? Sadly, that is precisely what some lawmakers seem to believe. We should be thankful the General Assembly adjourned when it did this year.

Even if we were to agree on definitions, state budgeting would continue to be contentious. There will never be complete agreement on what in fact fits those definitions. And there will never be enough money to fund everything that legislators want to include in the budget.

We need to be reminded occasionally that negotiations and compromise are essential elements of politics in a free society. In our system, we work out our regional differences, special-interest conflicts and competing value preferences principally in the form of legislative solutions reached by our elected representatives. Those solutions are often imperfect, but we accept them rather than resort to force and violent conflict.

Legislators are not free to ignore constitutional rules or to make up new ones as they work out conflicts. One of those constitutional rules -- the rule that two different objects can't be included in a single piece of legislation -- prohibits what the state Senate, the incumbent governor, Timothy M. Kaine, and his immediate predecessor, Mark Warner, have done with the budget bill during two of the last three legislative sessions. They have proposed a tax increase in the budget bill itself in an attempt to force the House to accept the tax increase or watch state government come to a halt without a budget.

There is a deeper problem contributing to these budget standoffs -- the decline of political parties. The two houses of the General Assembly are nominally controlled by Republicans, but they stand for fundamentally different political philosophies. The grass roots and the volunteer leadership of the Republican Party were emphatically opposed to the position of those Senate Republicans who joined with Senate Democrats to raise taxes in 2004 and attempted to enact another massive tax hike in 2006.

The Senate seems to reflect the position of Whipple, a Democrat. That is not a surprise since the Republican leadership in the Senate has split with conservative GOP senators and joined Democrats in that chamber in support of tax hikes formally opposed by the Republican Party of Virginia. The House Republican Caucus opposed the tax hike proposed by the Senate and refused to yield even when the Senate seemed bent on shutting down state government. Ultimately, the budget was enacted without a tax increase.

Unless this philosophical rift between the chambers is resolved, Virginia's reputation for fiscal responsibility and good government will continue to erode. We can't afford to repeat this pattern of legislative stalemate.

Virginians have been slow to embrace the Responsible Political Party Model, which contemplates enough internal discipline for a party to pursue a common political agenda. This reluctance comes with a cost. Voters cannot effectively choose a policy direction when the parties themselves are divided. And party discipline and coherence will be difficult to achieve until the party exercises effective control over the process of nominating its candidates.

McSweeney, who practices law in Richmond, is former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. Send e-mail to pmcsweeney@mcsweeneycrump.com. *